It’s tough being a rock star. Today, here you are, walking down the street, with your sunglasses, denims and quiff, redhead on one arm, brunette on another. The last time we saw you in 2012, you were selling out the Royal Albert Hall and the Roundhouse, seeing your album soar above Adele’s in the charts (and scoring your second Mercury prize nomination). But your fame has also had a darker side since then: you struggled with prescription drugs, relied heavily on the love of those around you, and spent months immobile in your bed, stuck inside your own head.
Today however you seem fitter and happier, and your arm candy do look particularly gorgeous, as they trail after you down one of your city’s steep hills. They stop dutifully as we pull up in your manager’s car: Alf is a copper-coloured spaniel and Fred a dusky collie. Richard Hawley leans in through the driver’s window, shaking a small plastic bag. “Nice to meet you,” he smiles. “Have a bag of dog shit!”
So hello to the 48-year-old father of three, and fully recovered 10-mile-a-day dog-walker, whose career has never been so big – and so completely on his own terms. His last album, Standing at the Sky’s Edge (2012), was angrier, stranger and louder than the warm, lovelorn music he is known for, yet it became his most commercial record to date. His unwavering commitment to album titles that reference Sheffield remained solid too, but they’ve got weirder over the years, from the nostalgic calls of city-centre newspaper sellers (Late Night Final, 2001) and romantic meeting points (Coles Corner, 2005) to ancient dumping grounds that flow into the river Don (Truelove’s Gutter, 2009) and a gritty vantage point (Standing at the Sky’s Edge) from which Hawley could rage.
This time around, his vantage point has got wilder, more rural, more weird. Hollow Meadows – the name of the new album – is a Peak District area sitting on the Yorkshire-Derbyshire border. We drive around it before meeting Hawley today, and it rolls out bleakly but beautifully under the late summer clouds. In the past it has held curiosities, such as a glass mausoleum built by 19th-century eccentric Horatio Bright to house his dead wife and son (this is referenced on the album’s opening track, I Still Want You: “If you stare through the glass from moment to moment / It’s funny what you find”). Others still stand there – Boot’s Folly, for example, a tower commissioned by local property developer Henry Boot to give work to builders suffering in the Depression.
“It’s a beautiful, kind of abandoned place…” Hawley settles on to a bench outside the Greystones pub, home to a well-known folk venue he attends regularly (folk music, as we’ll find out, has played a big part in his life in recent years). Fred and Alf curl themselves sleepily around his feet, as he holds the first of many fags in his left hand, the first of many Guinnesses in the right. “There are so many brilliant stories there too. In Boot’s Folly there used to be a staircase all the way to the top but they had to get rid of it because a cow climbed up and fell off!”
Hollow Meadows was suggested to him as a title by a friend with whom he attends Sheffield Wednesday matches, although he shrugged it off at first, as people suggest names to him all the time. “It’s sweet, and I do like it, but they’ll come up and say, ‘Great album title for you, Rich’, and it’ll be Whatever Street, and I’ll go, ‘Thanks’. But he kept coming back to Hollow Meadows when he was bed-bound, for reasons that won’t transpire to be hugely rock’n’roll. “I was drawn towards it. And, well, when you find out the story…”
It turns out Hollow Meadows was originally called Auley Meadows – “and in Sheffield we drop our aitches”, Hawley nods conspiratorially. On a local forum he then found out that it was named after a “lost place” west of Sheffield, and that the Hawley family had lived there from the 1300s. He found it “mind-blowing” that his roots in the city were that deep. “It did my head in. And that was after the thing with the drugs.”
Some context: in June 2012, on the second day of his tour for Standing at the Sky’s Edge, Hawley slipped on a marble staircase while wearing leather-soled shoes. “Sober,” he says. “I’m an idiot. A colossal idiot at times, and it is a worry.” He spent the next month with a broken leg, in a wheelchair, on tour, on Tramadol. “I can’t remember most of it. There was a festival, Latitude, that I cannot remember doing… Guy Garvey pushed me on stage, dressed in a high-visibility jacket, and we looked like that couple off Little Britain.” But you can’t remember it? He shakes that quiff vigorously. “It’s gone.”
Then he came off the drugs, all in one go, “and it was like I’d been thrown down a lift shaft”. As he speaks about that time, the northern joker is replaced by someone else – someone gentler, softer, more vulnerable. “Tramadol. Diclofenac. They hand that shit out like sweets. The effects were worse, mentally, than any street drugs I ever experienced. It was truly horrifying. Because I’d had previous, shall we say.”
Hawley has talked about his drug use before – acid, cannabis and speed in his teenage years, more of it in his guitar-playing days in 90s indie group the Longpigs. “If I’d had success younger, I’d be dead. There’s no doubt in my mind.” What saved him then, he says, was joining up with his old friend Jarvis Cocker during Pulp’s tour for their bucolic 2001 album, We Love Life. “I was still clinging to the rocks of lunacy at that point, so turning up in the middle of all that with Pulp was a bit like being this rabid dog in a calm, placid place… and now I’ve been straight for 16 years. I haven’t touched any illicit substances.” He lifts up his hands. “Fags and ale, that’ll do me.”
Hawley’s cousin committed suicide after coming off prescription drugs in 2013, and that proved a salutary lesson to him when it came to his own Tramadol withdrawal. He seems uncomfortable discussing the details. “I don’t want to make too much of it, to be honest, because I’m a survivor, I survive… but the one thing about it was that I was reminded that I felt very loved.” Friends rallied round, and then there was his wife, Helen. “She’s an incredible woman,” he glows. In another bit of un-rock’n’roll CV detail, they’ve been together 25 years and have three children. “One of each!” he hams. “Sorry, that was Les Dawson, not me.”
His health problems weren’t over after the broken leg, however. In 2013 he slipped a disc after a spirited session on a sit-up machine. He spent nearly six months in bed barely able to move, which reminded him of his childhood in and out hospital, having 30 operations to fix his hare lip and cleft palate. We talk about other musicians who have spent time in hospital as kids: John Lydon after meningitis, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young after polio. Hawley nods sagely.
“Once again I had to live in my head. And, to my relief, I already knew that the thoughts inside my head are OK, because I’d taken enough acid. But we live in a time where our outer being is kind of everything: how we look, how people think about us, which comes from selfies and internet culture, and how people can be really vicious and make immediate judgments. Our inner being is so neglected these days that a third of northern Europe is on Prozac.
“[Hollow Meadows] is an internal record… it’s about other lost places. It’s about reconnecting with a part of yourself you’d forgotten about.”
It all sounds rather spiritual, I say. “‘Thoughtful’ is better than ‘spiritual’ and all that trouser,” he smiles. “I don’t want to sound like some hippy. Love and peace are states of mind, though, aren’t they? They’re not fashion items.”
The musical mood of Hollow Meadows is more like the Hawley of old – lushness replaces loudness, and there’s less rage, more rumination and romance. Which Way features a person who has “been living upside down, never knowing where I’m bound”. The World Looks Down bemoans a society that has been told “don’t look up into the sky, look in your hands”, while What Love Means tells how Hawley felt when his eldest child, daughter Rosie, 21, left home to go to university. “Did we pass the test?” her dad asks, touchingly. “We’re left the love we’re left / Heart of mine made less/ I’ll never forget the day you left.”
Another song that says a lot about Hawley’s recent past is Heart of Oak, written about his friend, folk singer Norma Waterson. They met in 2010 when he was making a Radio 4 documentary, The Ocean, about the British coastline: “She sang The Bay of Biscay in her living room, and I nearly fell through the floor.” Three years later he went on tour with her family, reviving her late siblings’ Lal and Mike Waterson’s cult 1972 album, Bright Phoebus: he sang Mike’s Danny Rose. “We were just in a white van – her, her husband Martin [Carthy] and her daughter Eliza [Carthy], driving round. And they were singing all the time. It was great. Like The Magical Mystery Tour!”
He feels at home with “folk people”, he says: his parents, Dave and Lyn, were folk-club enthusiasts. “They’re human beings, you know? When I first met Mike we were in his shed, having crafty fags while he was building a stair gate for Eliza’s baby. He was all, ‘Here, put your knee on there, kid,’ sawing away – no side to him at all, just dead-on, my kind of bloke.”
And then there’s the man who has become one of his very best friends, traditional folk guitarist Martin Simpson. After meeting at the Radio 2 folk awards in 2011, they realised they lived on opposite sides of the same street. “And we have formed a strong bond. We’re in and out of each other’s houses – our wives are definitely sick of us.” Hawley’s house is now stuffed with vintage acoustic guitars, while Simpson’s is packed with amplifiers and effects pedals.
Hawley co-produced Simpson’s 2013 album, Vagrant Stanzas, and in 2014 the pair played Heartbreak Hotel together at the 2014 folk awards. Hawley thinks their unusual bonding makes perfect sense. “You know, Chuck Berry is folk music to me, because he writes stories, and Hank Williams and Hendrix, they’re not that far apart. When you break it down to the chords and the music, it’s just a different way of expressing the same kind of information.”
As we drain the umpteenth drinks of the day, Hawley ponders woozily why he’s connecting with more people than ever. He remembers a time when his old label, Mute, tried to work out the demographics of his fanbase. “They could define it quite clearly with other people, but couldn’t with me.”
He thinks it’s mainly because he’s less important than his music. “If you become more famous than your songs, you’re fucked – do you know what I mean? It’s your songs, your output, that’s the most important thing. I find it a great honour when people say, ‘We had our first dance at our wedding to that’ or ‘We buried my mum to that.’ Although there was a lady who told me – which I found darkly funny – that she had her baby in a birthing pool to The Ocean.”
He laughs, filthily. “I’d have thought that if you were basically passing a fire extinguisher sideways out of your vaginal passage, that the last thing you’d want is a song about the fucking ocean!”
His theory about songs being more important than their singers works for another Sheffield star too. Often, when he’s out with his redhead and brunette, Hawley spots the Human League’s Phil Oakey walking his pets. “I didn’t recognise him at first but he recognised me – and we just started talking about dogs. I loved it. It just felt normal. I’m sure it’s the same for him.”
But don’t you find it strange that you can have such success and live an ordinary life? “Yeah, but he’s rooted, you see. It’s a bit like what Quentin Crisp said: ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’
“He’s a lovely bloke, Phil. I bet he knows that with the trappings of fame and success, you lose more than you gain.”
Hawley reaches out for his dogs’ leads, and looks entirely at peace with the world. “I don’t want to be away from my people, whoever and wherever they are. Do you understand? They speak my tongue.”
Hollow Meadows is released by Parlophone on 11 September. Richard Hawley tours the UK from 23 Oct
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